paris

It’s not easy to capture the inside of a crypt, especially on a sunny day. You have to find one with the proper orientation to the sun so that the outside isn’t blown and the inside isn’t black. I quite like this shot for that reason.

What I really liked in the Père Lachaise cemetery compared to others I have visited is that parts of it are not nicely laid out and manucured. There are wild areas, where the tombs seem to jut from the ground, the vines have invaded the stones, etc. It feels much more like what I expect a cemetery to feel like, a place forgotten by the living.

One of the secrets of street photography (at least how I practice it) is spotting little things that clash. As I was walking past this posh luggage store on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré I saw this man focused on his mobile and this idea popped in my head that he might be buying luggage online…

Believe it or not, despite having lived in or near Paris for close to two decades, I never went to the Père Lachaise cemetery, probably the most famous one in Paris. During my last trip there I took advantage of a sunny Saturday morning to correct that. Unlike the Montparnasse cemetery which I visited last year, the Père Lachaise is much wilder. There are very well curated areas, but it also has its share of ruined lots. My favourite.

The old Louvres is a wonderful piece of architecture, and I was one of those who for a long time though the glass Pyramid was a mistake. But actually the contrast it creates is really interesting, and this is what I tried to show here.

Walking down Faubourg Saint-Honoré and from afar I started seeing bits of this facade. I was pretty stunned when I finally saw the whole thing, and I was clearly not the only one (although most of the others seemed to be Japanese tourists).

I have always had this fascination for architectural alignments: colonnades, footbridges, tunnels. And the area in Paris around the Louvres is great for such photos, except advertising seems to have invaded all those alignments on Rue de Rivoli. Thankfully, the Comédie Française (our national theatre) is having none of that, and I was able to shoot this in front of the entrance last week.